Ethiotime1
A major dam in southern Ukraine was severely damaged in an explosion on Tuesday, unleashing a massive new humanitarian crisis and surge in floodwaters while casting doubt on the long-term safety and viability of a nearby nuclear power plant.
A major dam in southern Ukraine was severely damaged in an explosion on Tuesday, unleashing a massive new humanitarian crisis and surge in floodwaters while casting doubt on the long-term safety and viability of a nearby nuclear power plant.
The fallout from the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam and power plant could reverberate across the battlefields and cities of southern Ukraine just as Kyiv readies a major counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Details are still emerging about when and how the dam in Russian-controlled territory ruptured, but Ukraine, NATO, and the European Union have already pinned the blame on Russia, after Ukrainian officials warned last year that Russian forces could be preparing to destroy the dam and blame Kyiv in a “false flag” operation. Top Western leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, backed Ukraine, saying the dam’s destruction “fits with the way in which [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wages this war.”
“Russia destroyed the Kakhovka dam inflicting probably Europe’s largest technological disaster in decades and putting thousands of civilians at risk,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted. “This is a heinous war crime.” The operator of the hydroelectric facility at Nova Kakhovka, which provided electricity to millions in southern Ukraine, also placed the blame squarely on the Kremlin.
Russia, in turn, claimed Ukrainian saboteurs were responsible for the explosion that caused the dam’s breach. If Russia were responsible for the attack, it could undermine its own war efforts in the long run, as the dam feeds a canal that supplies 85 percent of water to Russian-controlled Crimea, the strategically important peninsula that Moscow first illegally annexed in 2014. Then again, the country that leans so heavily on scorched earth could very well turn to sodden earth.
Dams and waterworks have long been featured in warfare to halt battlefield advances, deny territory to opposing forces, or stop the flow of water and electricity to the enemy.
The Dutch famously flooded the low-lying country to deny the feared Spanish tercios the opportunity to advance during the Eighty Years’ War in the 16th century. The Kuomintang destroyed dikes on the Yellow River in 1938 in an attempt to mire Japanese invaders in the mud, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. In 1941, the Soviet Union destroyed the Dnipro dam in an attempt to slow the Nazis’ sweeping advance through Ukraine. Dams in the Ruhr region, then considered Nazi Germany’s industrial heartland, were targeted by British bombers two years later to disrupt Adolf Hitler’s war machine. At the height of the war against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group in Iraq in 2016, Western officials warned that IS would try to sabotage the massive Mosul Dam to spark a humanitarian crisis and slow advances by Western-backed Iraqi forces into IS territory.
If the concept isn’t new in history, the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam still marks a grim new chapter in the war in Ukraine, putting at risk tens of thousands of civilian lives and sowing a new ecological catastrophe in southern Ukraine.
Nearly 40,000 people reside in at-risk flooding zones in both Russian-held and Ukrainian-held territories by the dam, leaving officials scrambling to dispatch trains and buses to evacuate thousands of civilians. The dam contained an amount of water comparable to Utah’s Great Salt Lake—around 18 million cubic meters of water—and its rupture threatens to wreak havoc on agriculture in southern Ukraine and water supplies to Crimea, of which it had been a major delivery channel.
“The destruction of Nova Kakhovka dam and the resulting floods pose a significant threat to civilians, their homes, and livelihoods,” said Ariane Bauer, the regional director for Eurasia for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “It leaves tens of thousands in a dire humanitarian situation. Damage to critical infrastructure can plunge entire communities into despair and devastate civilian lives.”
Russia has for months sought to blow up Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and plunge the country into chilly darkness. The latest attack on the dam, a 350-odd megawatt hydroelectric facility, appears to further the campaign to pull the plug on Ukraine’s ability to resist.
The dam’s breach also sparked immediate questions about the safety and viability of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), one of Europe’s largest nuclear power plants in Ukrainian territory now held by Russia. The dam supplied cooling water to the reactors at the plant.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said it was monitoring the situation closely but at this time there was “no immediate nuclear safety risk” at Zaporizhzhia. “The current dam break does not pose immediate danger to the ZNPP, as the cooling water for the power plant is provided from an operational pond in place next to the power plant,” said Kadri Simson, the EU energy commissioner, on Twitter.
Russia has previously targeted the power plant’s auxiliary power supplies that feed its cooling facilities, raising the specter of nuclear brinkmanship without rockets. For months, repeated shelling around the plant has alarmed international officials and left nearby Ukrainian communities bracing for a potential meltdown.
It’s unclear what effect the dam’s destruction could have on the battlefield in Ukraine, but it comes just as Ukraine is kicking off a highly anticipated counteroffensive to regain territory from Russian forces in the southern region. The exact details of the counteroffensive have been kept under wraps, but widespread flooding could slow or even halt any plans by Ukrainian forces to launch lightning strikes against Russian positions in the region east and south of Kherson.
On the diplomatic front, the fallout from the dam could serve to further alienate Russia on the world stage as reports come in about the widespread humanitarian toll of the move. If Russia is found to be responsible for the damage to the dam, it would add to the tally of war crimes that Russian forces have already allegedly committed in Ukraine.
Destroying dams is considered a war crime under international law, according to the so-called Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977, which states that “dams, dikes, and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.”
